"True" text format

[Jim]

If I paste formatted text from Word into a cell, the formatting is lost. If
I paste formatted text into the formula bar, the formatting is kept.
Manipulating formatting characters in a cell seems to have similar results
(most formatting is lost). Is there a way to programmatically access the
formula bar of a cell to achieve a "true" text formatting?

 

[Rick Rothstein]

My copy of XL2003 works backwards from what you posted... if I paste
formatted text from Word directly into a cell, the formatting is retained,
but if I paste it into the Formula Bar, the formatting is lost.

 

[Jim]

I have 2007. If I try to paste several paragraphs into a single cell, each
paragraph will be placed in separate cells, if the text contains bullets,
they will be eliminated. If I paste the same text in the formula bar, all
formating is kept in the cell. From my assessment of 2007 I suspect that
Microsoft considers true formatting to be a bug and should be eliminated from
Excel.

 

[Rick Rothstein]

Okay, for that scenario, XL2003 works the same. When you said "formatting",
I assumed you meant font stuff like Bold, Italics, Color, etc. What is
happening is when there are "hard returns" (the Windows standard of a
carriage return followed by a line feed) in your text, and you paste that
into a cell, Excel assumes each hard return delimits a new piece of data and
splits the pasted data one entry per row. When you paste the text into the
Formula Bar, Excel assumes all the text is meant for the selected cell and
pastes it all into the cell. This is the standard way Excel works and it
does the above for any text containing hard returns (that is, the text can
be copied from anywhere, not just Word). I'm not exactly sure why the
bullets are removed when the text is split into different rows though. My
guess is the bullets are not *part* of the text, but rather something that
is done to the text as a group... when the text is split apart, the group no
longer exists for the bullets to be attached to.